With the explosive growth in time spent on YouTube by babies and toddlers, it's important to analyze what they're watching on YouTube. Indexes that evaluate the contents of YouTube channels for infants and toddlers have been developed, but since those were evaluation-based indexes of educators and parents, it is difficult to find out what content…

Maternal depression is a global public health concern with far-reaching impacts on child development, yet our understanding of mechanisms remains incomplete. This study examined whether parenting mediates the association between maternal depression and child outcomes. Participants included 841 rural Pakistani mother-child dyads (50% female).…

Given the substantial increase in children attending center-based childcare over the past decades, the consequences of center-based childcare for children's development have gained more attention in developmental research. However, the relation between center-based childcare and children's neurocognitive development remains relatively…

This study establishes a sequence of developing mental state understandings in infants. We used three violation-of-expectation paradigms to assess fifty-seven 16-month-olds' ability to (a) infer an actress's intention from her prior repeated approaches to an object, (b) recognize her emotion by watching her facial-emotional display, and (c) deduce…

Detecting self-generated actions and imitating other-generated actions are important abilities in order to interact with others. The relationship between these domains was investigated in 6-8-month-old infants. In a contingency-preference task, infants observed their own legs on a real-time and a delayed video display. In an imitation task, the…

The study of development vacillates between a focus on change (i.e., studying how and why infants are so different from adults) and excitement about early competence and continuity (i.e., studying how capable infants are, and marveling at how similar they turn out to be to adults). The study of memory development has been no exception. This…

Taiwan has over the past three decades been experiencing demographic changes that may pose important concerns for children's quality of life. This study examines the relationships and potential pathways between family structure transitions and early childhood development. Our analysis is based on 19,499 children from the 2005 birth cohort who…

Infants' responses to typical and scrambled human body shapes were assessed in relation to the realism of the human body stimuli presented. In four separate experiments, infants were familiarized to typical human bodies and then shown a series of scrambled human bodies on the test. Looking behaviour was assessed in response to a range of different…

Data suggest that young infants (110-130 days old) process distinctive features of objects that continuously change orientation. The importance of these findings for theories of cognitive and perceptual development of infants is discussed. (Author/DB)

Results of a study conducted in 14 villages of Sui Lin Township, Taiwan, suggest the hypothesis that, under conditions of extreme economic impoverishment and among children within populations where energy protein malnutrition is endemic, there is an inverse relationship between incidence of morbidity in infancy and measures of motor and mental…

A longitudinal study of 31 babies in their twelfth through twenty-third weeks of age tested the Neo-Piagetian theory of a shift or spurt in infants' cognitive development at the age of 4 months. Results were consistent with this neo-Piagetian concept of stage change. (MDM)

Longitudinal data gathered on 24 children at 51 months of age and at earlier ages suggest that children currently characterized as faster habituators, in terms of first fixation data, may be somewhat advanced cognitively compared to slower habituators. (Author/DB)

Thirty-five children who had participated in a study of mastery motivation at one year of age were reevaluated at 3.5 years. Findings differed for boys and girls and indicated that a wide range of behaviors in the cognitive-motivational domain must be examined to find developmental continuities. (Author/CB)

Investigates whether temperamental differences mediated infants' responses to the early environment and explores the nature of the relationship between temperament and cognitive-intellectual development. Subjects, 100 six-month-old infants, were observed in their homes three times over a three-week period. Data suggest a greater reactivity to the…